Raw milk is strained before it is refrigerated below 40 degrees for a minimum of two hours. In addition to being free of additives, raw milk has a smooth, creamy taste.
Photo: Meryl Schenker/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Raw milk is strained before it is refrigerated below 40 degrees for...

Related Stories

Consumers almost always link arms with government public health agencies banning the sale of food believed to contain dangerous pathogens. But that kumbaya spirit appears to vaporize when the consumable is raw milk.

From coast to coast, the controversy sizzles with almost identical arguments. The infectious-disease community insists that unpasteurized milk can contain E. coli, campylobacter, brucella, listeria, salmonella and other bugs that can cause disease and sometimes death, and thus it should not be marketed.

On the other side of the barricades, some parents and natural food activists who want to know where their food comes from are adamant that pasteurization -- cooking the milk to at least a bug-killing 160 degrees -- lessens the nutritional benefits of milk, and that the government is assaulting personal rights when it decides what parents can feed their children or eat themselves.

In 26 states, raw milk can't be legally sold. But in the rest of country, including Washington state, it's permitted, at least for the moment and to varying degrees.

"The entire issue of raw milk is a mixture of controversy, passion and emotion. Some believe that pasteurized milk is a government conspiracy, like fluoride in (drinking) water," said Jay Gordon, executive director of the Washington State Dairy Association.

Family farmers throughout the Pacific Northwest have shown that they'll milk just about anything that will stand still. Cows and goats are the mainstay, but milk products from sheep, buffalo, yak and even llamas all have their fans.

In Washington, only 22 dairies have been licensed to sell raw milk -- 12 for cows and 10 for goats.

That handful of dairies supplies scores of outlets -- natural food stores, farmers markets, and at least two grocery chains -- and the demand for raw milk appears to be soaring, even though the cost at $8 to $13 a gallon is far higher than the pasteurized product.

In addition to being free of growth hormones and other additives, raw milk has a rich, smooth, creamy taste that makes traditional off-the-shelf milk seem watery. Many people fervently believe that while pasteurization kills the harmful bacteria, beneficial microbes also are destroyed.

But it is true that some people have gotten ill from consuming improperly handled unpasteurized milk.

Although the number of cases nationwide is low, contaminated raw milk can contain a strain of E. coli that sometimes causes hemolytic uremic syndrome, a life-threatening complication that can cause kidney failure and death.

It took a 2005 outbreak of E. coli in raw milk that sickened 18 people in Washington and Oregon and put two children on life support to get all the players -- the dairy and raw milk communities, lawmakers, the state agriculture and health departments -- together to try to figure out what to do, Gordon said.

Last week, the owners of the dairy that sold the tainted milk, Michael and Anita Puckett, pleaded guilty in federal court in Seattle to the charge of distributing adulterated food. They sold unpasteurized milk to 45 families who had bought shares of Sorrell, Daisy, Glory, Libby and Pepper, the Woodland dairy's five cows.

"The idea of sharing was a loophole that had to be addressed," explained Gordon, whose federation represents the state's 452 bovine dairies.

Claudia Coles, food safety manager for the state Department of Agriculture, agreed that something had to done, that "in these outbreaks, it is almost always the children that become the victims."

The state's options for trying to control the sale of raw milk products were limited. In other states where it was banned completely, a black market flourished. So the question facing regulators is whether public health is better protected by regulating, testing, licensing and inspecting the raw milk or just by banning it so it goes underground with no oversight.

They agreed to license raw milk and require many of the same testing and inspections and standards required of commercial, pasteurized dairy operations, Gordon said. They also added severe penalties for breaking the rules.

"If they're selling milk -- bartering, trading, sharing -- anything in commerce and they're not licensed, they get a warning. If they state catches them again, it's a stiff fine and jail time," Gordon said.

The law also requires that all raw milk carry the warning: "This product has not been pasteurized and may contain harmful bacteria. Pregnant women, children, the elderly and persons with lowered resistance have the highest risk of harm from use of this product."

Who are these farmers?

"Many of these people didn't start out to be dairy farmers," Gordon explained. "They got into this and they thought that the raw milk they were producing was 'nature's most perfect food.' "

When they moved from a small farm in Illinois in 2001 to work for Boeing, they wanted a farmlike atmosphere in which to raise their daughter. Soon, they had organically grown vegetables and chickens that produce brown and sometimes, green eggs.

"I wanted the raw milk for my daughter, to give her a better chance at good health," said Darlene, so she bought her own cow.

"But a cow gives lots of milk and we found that other people had a strong desire for the milk and they kept knocking on our door. We didn't advertise. People came to us," she explained.

They bought a second bovine and started a cow share. People paid a $1 a day boarding fee for their share of the cow and got the fresh milk they wanted, she said.

But one day, at a seminar at Green River Community College, they heard Claudia Coles say: 'It doesn't matter how you slice it, if you do a cow share you're breaking the law," Darlene recalls.

"That was quite a shock," she said.

In February, Meadowwood received its state license to sell raw milk. While many of its customers are from Enumclaw, others drive in from Seattle each week to get their milk. The Sillimans are considering getting another cow, a Jersey, of course, because they produce milk with the highest butterfat, she said.

"But only one more. Keeping them clean and the entire tiny production process impeccably clean, which it must be for safety, is a great deal of work. Three. That's all," says Darlene, who also works as an aviation maintenance instructor.

What's the government doing?

Doug Powell says he's not surprised that government health officials denounce the dangers of raw milk then turn around and license the sale of the same milk.

"In part, it's because of the almost evangelical way people talk about raw milk and that America is founded on consumer choice," said the associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University.

"The numbers of illnesses from outbreaks caused by unpasteurized milk are not that high. You could very easily make the cases that 'Wow, maybe tomatoes should be regulated a whole lot more than we do now because the numbers of cases of salmonella saintpaul are up to 550 now,' " said Powell, who is also scientific director for the International Food Safety Network.

Powell is correct -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that from 1998 to last year, there were only 39 outbreaks in which raw milk or cheese made from it were implicated. About 830 people were sickened, 66 hospitalized and one died.

"I don't care if people drink raw milk. What I'm particularly concerned about is them then imposing their choice on their kids, because they're the ones who get sick.

"People have the right to sell a product, but if it makes people sick, they have a right to sue."

Seattle food safety lawyer Bill Marler is up to his neck in many of those lawsuits. He grew up drinking raw milk on the farm "because that's what my dad wanted us to do," he said. He has tried injury suits stemming from most of Washington's raw milk outbreaks and is now handling similar cases in California and Missouri.

"The entire raw milk debate is so emotionally charged that there's no common ground at all," Marler said. "The reality is if you poison a little child by selling a product that could easily be pasteurized, you're going to have to deal with the legal issues surrounding that," he said.

So why do major groceries like Whole Foods and PCC Markets take the risk to sell it?

The customer demand for it is "overwhelming and growing dramatically," said Trudy Bialic PCC's public affairs director.

PCC sold raw milk in the 1990s, stopped, began again a few years ago, stopped and is now about to start selling it again, she said, adding that the key is the "careful selection of the right dairy, one that is meticulous in its cleanliness and using the safest practices."

PCC's milk will be supplied by the 21 cows at Jackie's Jerseys, a small, family dairy farm near Bellingham run by Bill and Jackie De Groot.

Bialic acknowledged the controversy surrounding the unpasteurized product but points out that "many other foods, such as rare hamburger, and even lettuce and tomatoes and fruits, often carry food-borne illness" and must be handled properly.